Introduction xv

within the Church itself, a reform both in diocesan and monastic life,
beginning in Lorraine and Burgundy, and seen significantly in the rapid
Western growth of Canon Law. But it was complicated and conditioned
by politics, especially by those of Italy and Germany, imperfectly linked
together by tfie Empire. Its history in the earlier stages is indicated in
this volume, but must be discussed more fully along with the church policy
of the great Emperor Henry III. Because its history under him is so closely
joined to that of the wider period, reaching from the Synod of Sutri to
the Concordat of Worms, it is left over for a later volume, although the
purely political side of his reign is treated here.
To the German kingship, ruling the great German duchies, inevitably
entangled in Italian affairs and in touch with warlike neighbours as yet
heathen and uncivilised, fell the traditions of the Empire, so far as terri-
torial sway and protectorship of the Papacy was involved. But to the
growing kingdom of France there came naturally the guardianship of
Carolingian civilisation. Mayence, Salzburg, Batisbon, and Cologne
to begin with, Hamburg and Bamberg at a later date, might be the
great missionary sees of the West, but Rheims and the kingdom to
which it belonged, together with the debatcable and Australian land of
Lorraine, inherited more distinctly the traditions of thought and learning.
Paris, the cradle of later France, had a preeminence in Franco greater
than had any city in its Eastern neighbour-land. So France with its
older and more settled life from Roman and Merovingian days had,
although with some drawbacks, a unity and coherence almont unique, just
as it had a history more continuous. Yet even so it had its great fiefs, with
their peculiarities of temperament and race, so that much of French
history lies in their gradual incorporation in the kingdom of which Parte
was the birthplace and the capital. And at Paris the varied story of
Scholasticism, that is, of medieval thought, may be said to begin.
Thus the lines upon which later histories were to run were already being
laid.for France, Germany, and England, and for Italy something the same
may be said. There to the mixture of races and rule, already givat, waB
added now the Norman element, to be at first a further cause of discord,
and then, as in France and England, a centre of stability and Htrongth.
The grasp of the Byzantine Emperors on Italy was becoming nominal
and weak: the Lombards, with scanty aspirations after unity, were by
this time settled. In Sicily, and for a time in the South, Saracens had
made a home for themselves, and, as in Spain, were cauoiug locally the
terror which, in a form vaster and more undefined, was to form, later
on, a dark background for the history of Europe as a whole. Home, for
all the West outside Italy a place of reverence and the seat of Papal